Remember the spring of 2020? The COVID spring? Well, in A Northern Spring I've captured a version of it in roughly 35,000 words: some prose, some poetry—so a hybrid capturing, a kind of memoir.
This version of that spring we'll never forget begins in Derry, in the North of Ireland, where, among other things, I was doing research on the Troubles for a study-abroad class I've created that uses the Troubles as a lens through which to better see and respond in art to the violences, fractures, and divisions in the US. While I was there, the then US president announced a vague travel ban for "everybody in Europe."
In four sections I call preludes spaced throughout the book, I write about being abroad and not being sure we'd be able to make it home as a pandemic was gripping the world, then not being sure we wanted to return to where the pandemic seemed a whole lot worse. The writing in these four sections is packaged in the form of text messages to an unnamed P from an unnamed MM that receive no replies—so text messages into a kind of void, based on the IRL fact that I didn't have an international travel plan for my phone so wasn't receiving any messages while abroad (they all came in at once when I landed back home). In between these preludes are poems about life at the start of the COVID pandemic, often in conversations with writing from pandemics of the past, or the one we got handed, or just texts that in light of the new realities of a pandemic seemed to gain significance.
I am one of those for whom the pandemic was a productive period. I wrote the book in real time, completing it in the spring of 2020. The book's ending, a section called "Minneapolis: The Last Week of May 2020," found me. There I write about the murder of George Floyd in South Minneapolis, where I live, and all the all that began to transpire locally in the wake of that.
There is a kind of coming full circle where the local becomes global when a mural in Belfast and a vigil in Derry—the last two places I'd experienced "normal" life before the COVID lockdown—honor/commemorate/bring attention to the murder of Floyd by members of the MPD.
So, evacuation, lockdown, uprising: these 35,000 or so words, with a real and true narrative arc, are my capturing of a confluence of events and circumstances over roughly two and a half months that are both peculiar to me and not peculiar to me at all, but shared by many (is it too much to say "all of us"?).
I've dedicated the book to Minneapolis, a city I fell in love with and decided I wanted to live in roughly 30 years ago on a school trip to see a Shakespeare play at the old Guthrie Theater, a city I eventually made my way to—and my life in—about twenty years ago. I still love it here but the love, as you'd expect, is a lot more complex than when it began.
PHOTOS: Clockwise from upper left: The lovely Sunflower Pub, across the street from our rental during our first say in Belfast; the street on which we would eventually locate—after passing it several times and missing it—the sought-after Duke of York; a snug in The Crown Liquor Saloon, which may or may not be the one featured in Anthony Bourdain's trip to Belfast for season 3, episode1 of No Reservations; The Garrick Bar, our first stop in country after dropping our bags at the rental flat, featuring me hungry and waiting for food (the libations arrived first); the view of Belfast from a window in our rental. All photos taken before the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, and so are the last depictions of a prior and now forever gone normalcy.
This version of that spring we'll never forget begins in Derry, in the North of Ireland, where, among other things, I was doing research on the Troubles for a study-abroad class I've created that uses the Troubles as a lens through which to better see and respond in art to the violences, fractures, and divisions in the US. While I was there, the then US president announced a vague travel ban for "everybody in Europe."
In four sections I call preludes spaced throughout the book, I write about being abroad and not being sure we'd be able to make it home as a pandemic was gripping the world, then not being sure we wanted to return to where the pandemic seemed a whole lot worse. The writing in these four sections is packaged in the form of text messages to an unnamed P from an unnamed MM that receive no replies—so text messages into a kind of void, based on the IRL fact that I didn't have an international travel plan for my phone so wasn't receiving any messages while abroad (they all came in at once when I landed back home). In between these preludes are poems about life at the start of the COVID pandemic, often in conversations with writing from pandemics of the past, or the one we got handed, or just texts that in light of the new realities of a pandemic seemed to gain significance.
I am one of those for whom the pandemic was a productive period. I wrote the book in real time, completing it in the spring of 2020. The book's ending, a section called "Minneapolis: The Last Week of May 2020," found me. There I write about the murder of George Floyd in South Minneapolis, where I live, and all the all that began to transpire locally in the wake of that.
There is a kind of coming full circle where the local becomes global when a mural in Belfast and a vigil in Derry—the last two places I'd experienced "normal" life before the COVID lockdown—honor/commemorate/bring attention to the murder of Floyd by members of the MPD.
So, evacuation, lockdown, uprising: these 35,000 or so words, with a real and true narrative arc, are my capturing of a confluence of events and circumstances over roughly two and a half months that are both peculiar to me and not peculiar to me at all, but shared by many (is it too much to say "all of us"?).
I've dedicated the book to Minneapolis, a city I fell in love with and decided I wanted to live in roughly 30 years ago on a school trip to see a Shakespeare play at the old Guthrie Theater, a city I eventually made my way to—and my life in—about twenty years ago. I still love it here but the love, as you'd expect, is a lot more complex than when it began.
PHOTOS: Clockwise from upper left: The lovely Sunflower Pub, across the street from our rental during our first say in Belfast; the street on which we would eventually locate—after passing it several times and missing it—the sought-after Duke of York; a snug in The Crown Liquor Saloon, which may or may not be the one featured in Anthony Bourdain's trip to Belfast for season 3, episode1 of No Reservations; The Garrick Bar, our first stop in country after dropping our bags at the rental flat, featuring me hungry and waiting for food (the libations arrived first); the view of Belfast from a window in our rental. All photos taken before the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, and so are the last depictions of a prior and now forever gone normalcy.